[TIP] For hosting at multiple locations

Ok, I can see a lot of bitching going on about hostwinds having some issues right now so I thought i would give you some tips.

BACKUP BACKUP BACKUP. I don't mean the hosting provides backup I mean do it by hand a minmum of once a month.

If your on a shared plan, get two. Yes I know it's money but if your not earning more than $12 a month from your sites you need to ramp up your efforts.

Don't have your nameservers and domain all with the same host, use a big player like godaddy (their hosting sucks but dns is ok). This goes on to follow to...

When you have two hosting sites with backups going to the second one if your main site goes down flip the DNS. It means you have holding pages or full live sites.

For the last one you need to alter what is called the TTL (time to live), I suggest 14,000 seconds (four hours). This means when it all goes wrong the most time any one site would be off is four hours. Their will be the odd exception because of propergation (how the DNS spreads around the internet) and caching. Some isp's like AOL ignore the TTL and cache it. However 80% of your customerbase should have a live site.

Now heres a spin, if you have two hosting providers with the same data (e.g. an MNS) you can point the A record to both of them and load balence them. This is not perfect but it means if you get a traffic spike it will share the load between the two sites meaning it's a lot less likely they will shut you down for resource usage. It also means if one goes down you can just drop the other DNS record out.

I know this is a little technical so if you want to ask me how to do it with a specific host post screenshots of their DNS panel and I'll do my best to tell you what to put where. However in most cases it'll be like:

www A (ip of host provider1) 14000
www A (ip of host provider2) 14000

Some might not let you alter the TTL however when you do change all NEW people will get the new record, only repeat visitors will see the old broken site.

Last rule Don't bitch, it's hard work being a hosting provider. I've done it and it's damn hard work especially in the current climate. Be nice when you call them up and ask them what the issues are, if they have an ETA and what the can do to assist you when their back up. Whatever they offer you request it in an email so you have it in writing. If you bitch at people they will not want to help you, they will already be having a bad day. Some manors and courtousy and being a little cheeky can go a LONG way.

Unfortuantly Email is a much more complex subject and not something i'm going to get into on here (I consult on delivrability as part of my day job so it bores me haha!). However if you are white had I strongly recomend if you send to hotmail users to setup return path certficaiton if your doing a lot of emails.

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